by Jasper Rees
The railways were not close to Victoria’s heart. She had driven everywhere from the moment she first acquired a car, and in the voiceover she fondly recalled holidays across Europe with her father spending days at the wheel. But the project of rail privatisation, embarked upon the year before, made her vocal. The production had to deal with a dozen different railway companies, some of whom wouldn’t let the crew board certain trains. The last straw came back at Crewe when they were refused permission to film Victoria drinking tea in the café, so instead she resumed her place on the bench where the film started. A man supping McEwan’s sat down and offered her shortbread. Insular to the last, she declined with a smile and dived into a paperback. Viewers – and reviewers who picked out this telling vignette – were not to know it was a set-up: the man with the shortbread was the production spark.
‘The idea of it being a train journey before they closed the railways was not a fully formed idea when we set out,’ says Russell England, who, when editing the film in Shepherd’s Bush in September, was surprised to get a call from Victoria asking if she could come to the cutting room. She visited three times and wrote her commentary as she watched the beautifully captured footage assume a shape. Suddenly the film started to sing with jokes about tea, marriage and the war as her writing responded to the visual rhythms of the edit in a new kind of comic duet. Unpredictably, the voiceover also bloomed into a polemic. After years of keeping her left-leaning views out of the public domain, Victoria had seen enough to feel she could weigh in. As she passed Sellafield, she voiced a prejudice against nuclear power, picturing employees ‘clutching their deformed reproductive organs in a jiffy bag’. With rising youth unemployment, she predicted a bleak homeless future for the children who asked for her autograph. She grumbled about traffic pollution, was angered by the grotesque discrepancy in pay between railway workers and company chairmen, and mourned the imminent demise of less lucrative branch lines. She finished with a modest but furious demand for ‘good fast trains that connect with other trains, that are affordable, reliable, safe, with proper food on them, with clean toilets’. There wasn’t room in the film for a sequence about a station announcer in York celebrated for her sing-song delivery. So over the credits, Victoria made her own station announcements: ‘Bing-bong! Customers please notice the toilets on platform 3 are closed due to them not being open … Please do not ask for a ticket as a refusal often offends … We don’t travel on your railways, please don’t travel on ours.’ The film would not be broadcast for another year.
The autumn brought another new foray when Victoria accepted an invitation to join most of the cast of Monty Python in Terry Jones’s new take on The Wind in the Willows. Jones asked her to play a washerwoman, later changed to the tea lady, who is taken prisoner by a gang of evil rats. She had never appeared on the big screen before and, while she didn’t particularly admire Jones’s script, ‘she loved big studios,’ says Geoffrey. ‘All that camaraderie, all that technical skill, and she thoroughly enjoyed the job.’
In September Victoria’s publisher at Methuen announced his retirement from full-time work. It was a measure of her esteem for Geoffrey Strachan that, asked to pay tribute in a farewell volume, she composed an enchanting poem full of witty echoes of his surname. The verse, never published, concluded:
Never was one’s work received
With apathy or scachan.
Never was one forced to publish
Cookery or pachan.
But now he plans to bugger off
And soon he will be gachan.
And I for one am sad to see
The back of Geoffrey Strawn.7
Not that this came to pass. Strachan offered to edit any further works of hers – ‘not excluding,’ he hopefully suggested, ‘that novel you once alluded to in a rash moment’.8 A couple of months later he and his successor Michael Earley proposed an omnibus edition collating everything in Up to You, Porky, Barmy and Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah, and suggested including some character monologues from paststand-up shows. Thus ‘Fattitude’, ‘Toupee Time’ and ‘Madeline’ joined ‘Brönteburgers’ and ‘This House Believes’ as the only sections of Victoria’s live act that she consented to have published. She called the new omnibus Chunky and, in a mockery of therapy speak, dedicated it ‘to all those very special people who have assisted in my personal growth and helped me become the uniquely flowered human truth unit that is wholly “me”!’
One of the sketches had a fresh airing in the West End. The Shakespeare Revue, collating songs and skits on a Bardic theme, was originally devised for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Christopher Luscombe, who co-staged the show, asked her for permission to perform ‘Giving Notes’, the sketch from As Seen on TV in which Julie Walters bossily addresses an am-dram troupe rehearsing Hamlet. Having her work performed by the RSC proved irresistible, and Victoria happily consented to editorial tweaks. In November Michael Codron brought the show to the Vaudeville Theatre, inviting Victoria and Geoffrey to the opening night, and then to the Ivy for a post-show dinner. It was her second momentous visit to the West End that autumn – the previous month she and Geoffrey were at the Comedy Theatre to see Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse, starring Celia Imrie alongside the playwright. Afterwards it was Celia’s idea to take them to Pinter’s dressing room. ‘It was pretty momentous, and a fine mutual respect was marked,’ says Celia. According to Geoffrey, Pinter ‘gave no inkling whether he knew who Vic was or not. If he hadn’t, he was very good at hiding it.’ The night she saw The Shakespeare Revue, Pinter happened to be dining at the Ivy too, and Victoria split off from Codron’s table to remake his acquaintance.
While the hiatus continued, she supported the BBC’s latest plan to repeat her shows, although she by no means placed equal faith in them all. In June Vivienne Clore had told Alan Yentob that Victoria ‘is fairly happy for the half hour “playlets” to go out round about the end of July as she thinks that fewer people will see them’.9 As Seen on TV was exhumed either side of Christmas 1995, while Pat and Margaret would be shown again in March 1996. Sensing that she didn’t seem to be up to much, the editor of the Sun Stuart Higgins even asked her if she fancied standing in for Garry Bushell as TV critic. ‘Much as I feel at one with Mr Bushell in many ways,’ she replied, ‘I am unable to accept your kind offer to take over from him as TV critic while he’s at Pontins. I am in the middle of writing my new stage show and I daren’t leave off.’10
The decision to go back on tour in 1996 – taking her back to the Royal Albert Hall in a schedule that ran deep into 1997 – persuaded Victoria to participate in her first television profile in a decade. After an overture from Melvyn Bragg, her involvement with The South Bank Show had a rocky birth when a researcher and prospective director arrived late for their first meeting to discuss what shape the film might take. Victoria complained to Bragg that they didn’t seem interested and threatened to pull out. A new director was assigned in the shape of Nigel Wattis, the head of arts at LWT. When he visited her at home ‘it was quite a frosty reception,’ he says. Nonetheless, a film schedule was drawn up.
‘I have had three weeks of sorting out press, brochures, T shirts, backing tapes, costumes, black patent loafers as decreed by Betty Jackson,’ Victoria told Charlotte Scott in January. ‘Now all I have to do is write the bloody thing.’11 Before she could sit down to write she threw herself into a ritual of mental cleansing, sorting the knicker drawer, buying socks, and tidying up the Duplo and Lego. ‘My house has to be to be perfect for one day before I can start writing,’ she said. ‘It’s like cleaning the windows before you have a baby.’12
By now the live formula she had been shaping for more than a decade was set in stone. After her traditional welcome (‘We’ve made it! We’re out the house!’), sections about motherhood, royalty and celebrity were all dropped into the grid. Some themes were revisited – terrible plastic-surgery clinics, assertiveness classes, awful marketing surveys, men buying erotic underwear for their wives, her posh neighbours. The s
econd half opened with Kimberley’s friend, promoted from her previous place in the encore. As before, Victoria made use of the long tall yarn about an imaginary friend to explore baffling areas of modern life – cellulite anxiety, faddy diets, invasive treatments, the nightmare of Christmas with someone else’s family. Having imagined meeting the queen in her 1993 show, Victoria now became her, presenting her own version of the queen’s Christmas message. Geoffrey resumed his role as an outside eye measuring the show’s impact on audiences as it took shape. What he witnessed from the auditorium was her total command of the material: ‘There were lines and phrases and moments in this show that always caused catatonic explosions of laughter. Seeing it night after night, I watched Vic continually pressing her nuclear button with deadly accuracy. It was a good feeling.’
Once more her audiences were treated to a frank access-all-areas tour of the female mind and body. Victoria imagined jamming an emergency Lil-Let up a stalker’s nostril. She joked about pubic outcrops, bad bras, the inconvenient fashion for wearing a body (‘Oh sod it, Angela, let’s just wet ourselves’). At a high-impact gym class she pictured middle-aged mothers wearing Pampers. She talked about the little roll of fat concealed about every woman’s person, indicating her own midriff: ‘Sometimes I think if I fell into a canal, would anybody bother to throw me a lifebelt?’ Cellulite, she explained, ‘looks like you’ve got raw crumpets tacked to your thighs’. Kimberley had hair extensions in her armpits and her friend was off to have her legs done: ‘For two quid you can keep your tights on, they just do what’s poking out your ladders.’ She mimed one friend having her first ever orgasm at the petrol pump.
As usual the show came together in a series of gigs in the Home Counties on Sunday nights in March and April (punctuated by a wet Easter holiday in Mallorca). New material gradually replaced the old, which lingered in her head from recent charity and cabaret gigs. For the first-night encore Victoria came on in a long blonde wig and Lycra, plonking down an exercise step that she had bought for personal use a few months earlier, and introduced herself as step-class instructor Hayley Bailey. The successor to Madge of Fattitude was on and off much more quickly and, by shunting the exercise routine to the encore, Victoria no longer had to perform an exhausting workout at the start of the second half. The comedy was mainly physical – she choreographed and refined funny lunges and jerks as the tour progressed. ‘That’s enough of that,’ she said after one stretch. ‘Take me knickers off me ovaries will have fell out.’
During the show’s gestation, Victoria had her biggest crisis yet about her songs. ‘She wanted them out,’ says Geoffrey, ‘but she couldn’t see a way to do it, and regretted keeping them in.’ When the South Bank Show researcher Simon Cherry proposed filming a sequence in which she would unpick her songwriting technique at the piano, she demurred. ‘I don’t have very much to say about them,’ she replied.13 One new song about wannabe celebrities she dropped during the try-outs. The first song was now delayed until more than twenty minutes into the show. Yet for all her desire to expunge melancholy songs, she had not come up with a better solution for closing the first half. So she composed the hauntingly sad ‘Andrea’ about a seventeen-year-old girl whose sister has already left home and who hopes to ‘fly away to a better day’. Although Victoria had watched her own older sisters fly the coop, she insisted the song was not autobiographical. ‘It comes out of how I perceive people to be living at the moment,’ she told Melvyn Bragg. ‘It’s not from my own life.’14
The other songs riffed mainly on sex. In ‘Baby Boom’, which she reprised with different lyrics at the end, Victoria sang of what she’d learned as she’d grown older:
Spots, specs,
Terrible at sex,
Lay there like a stunned gazelle.
I was thirty-three
When it dawned on me
That girls could move as well.
‘Pam’ was delivered in the clipped voice of an Englishwoman of a certain age who has proudly never had an orgasm (‘Not me, not my scene / I prefer a game of Rummy and an Ovaltine’). The climax was a tango about masturbation. ‘Wanker’ was her response to the (perhaps apocryphal) news that the EEC was to ban the term ‘speccy four eyes’ among other pejorative terms. The rhyme scheme was ingeniously constructed to deliver the first laugh before she got anywhere near the punchline: ‘But there’s a term I’m rather fond of / And to use it I do hanker / It’s not heard in Casablanca …’ The song was a linguistic milestone for Victoria, who longed to say ‘fuck’ in her act as other comedians were now doing with impunity. ‘It was a daily discussion,’ says Geoffrey. ‘She used that word and others in her ordinary life, but she thought that a big proportion of her audience would baulk at it, so she decided not to.’ She voiced this frustration at a try-out date in St Albans when she was first filmed for The South Bank Show. ‘Terrible strain having a film crew,’ she confided. ‘I haven’t said bollocks since Tuesday.’
Having talked in detail about giving birth in the last tour, Victoria used the business of bringing up small children as a new way of connecting with her audience. There were hoots of recognition as she described the frantic explosion of activity at ten to nine on a school morning. Something about having a small boy provoked Victoria’s unsentimental side: ‘If I want to know how tall he is, I just check the snot mark on my trousers.’ One morning, she said, her son wouldn’t get dressed, ‘so I overreacted. I’ve had him adopted.’ Meanwhile, having a daughter brought Victoria face to face with her own shortcomings. A survey asked her what she’d discovered about herself since becoming a mother: ‘I had to put that I am crap at plaits.’
The tour began in May and, in the main, stuck to the pattern of midweek residencies with long weekends at home. In every dressing room she plastered the mirror with snaps of the children. Her homing instinct was so great that she commuted to and from every performance as far away as Wolverhampton and Nottingham. During half-term week, she hooked up with the children at Mole Barn while doing shows at the Bradford Alhambra. Phil McIntyre laid on a driver who was instructed not to talk to her. ‘On the way there I need to be quiet and calm,’ she explained, ‘and on the way home my head’s still racing. Either way, I need a bit of silence.’15 Once delivered back to Highgate, her habit was to check the fax machine, pick up socks and do the washing, then read in bed beside a slumbering Geoffrey until half past one. ‘I’m getting a bit tired now,’ she told Simon Cherry in early July. ‘The show is not the problem at the moment, it’s getting up at six thirty to listen to Grace doing the scale of E minor.’16
When the tour reached Blackpool, she was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg, who blindsided her by suggesting that Pat and Margaret represented two sides of her own personality. ‘That’s a bit perspicacious of you,’ she muttered uncomfortably. (In fact, all the questions were written by Simon Cherry.) By now Victoria had developed a warm relationship with the director Nigel Wattis, who grew bolder. ‘It was a friendly dance,’ he says. ‘She knew she had to give us enough to make a film.’ Thus from Blackpool he chartered a helicopter to fly up the coast to Morecambe and Silverdale, where from a passenger seat she pointed down at her old homes.
Victoria had another chance to revisit the past when, between two shows in Southend, she collected yet another honorary degree. This was to be her fourth and last such honour and, as it came from her Birmingham University a quarter of a century on from her matriculation, the most meaningful. ‘Of course,’ she told an audience of graduating students and their families in a charming retrospective speech, ‘in the autumn of 1971 I wasn’t the glamorous, sophisticated figure that I never became.’17 From her student years she recalled her feelings of social and intellectual inadequacy, her predatory lecturer, and her grim bedsits, and she reheated a faithful old gag about the Baby Belling that took half an hour to heat a tin of soup: ‘I could never wait that long so I used to drink it cold and hang my stomach over the gas fire.’18 Offered this platform, she once again touched on her new preoccupation with the
narrowing life chances of the next generation. ‘Thank you to the Government of 1971 who gave me a full grant,’ she concluded. ‘Will they ever catch on again, I wonder? I’m off now to do what my education has qualified me to do, which is to get laughs from 2,000 people at the Cliffs Pavilion, Southend.’19 She didn’t mention her pass degree, nor did she have time to stay for the luncheon.
The recollections continued when the first leg of the tour concluded with a dozen shows at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. The South Bank Show proposed visiting Victoria’s childhood homes, and one morning they all drove over to Bury. She was nervous about being filmed in Tottington Road so, through the window of her gleaming black Subaru Forester, she pointed to the window of her first bedroom. It was a harder task to persuade her back to Birtle Edge House. With begrudging permission from its new owner, she was filmed walking on the lawn at the front of her teenage eyrie, now smartly restored. While up there, and without warning, Simon Cherry ambushed her with a copy of A Swish of the Curtain, her favourite book in childhood. As Victoria read from Pamela Brown’s homage to the theatre a glowing smile spread across her face. Another old haunt they visited was the Granada studio where Wood and Walters was made. Not every encounter could be quite so well choreographed. Two excitable fans turned up at a post-show signing session wearing yellow berets. ‘Oh Christ,’ muttered Victoria as she saw them coming – the reaction was carefully excluded from the film. On another day a mother and daughter dashed up on the street and asked for an autograph. ‘I don’t understand what people think they’re getting from that contact,’ she told the crew.
